NEWSWEEK: You’re a 21st-century architect yet your designs connect to 20th -century modernism. MacKay-Lyons: It’s funny you say that. Three of us Canadian architects were at a symposium recently talking about how our work departs and relates to pioneering modernist work. The critic Malcolm Quantrill calls our firm’s work “renewed modernism.” There are a lot of young architects doing what I’d call “retro-style” modernism, making architecture that looks like it was designed in the 1950s. But “renewed modernism” is saying that a lot of what the early modernists were interested in is still alive and valued in our work. The idea of social agency—the idea that architecture could actually have a utopian agenda socially—is something we would still subscribe to.
But there are also other issues that we care about. One is urbanism or landscape—the issues of context. Another, I would say, is a kind of North American attitude about humanism, as opposed to European modernism. We still hang on to a lot of the ideals of the early modern movement but we need to move on, too.
At the same time you espouse modernist ideals, your architecture is very rooted in Nova Scotia, its landscape and building traditions such as barns and ships. Yes, the idea of the early modern movement being interested in only universal things is where we differ. I’m interested in the universal but in getting to it through the particular—the issue of place in architecture, the specificity of climate, culture, landscape, material culture. We rely on those things for content, for authenticity.
That might have been considered a conservative idea in the modern movement, but it’s really a radical idea now, because of the numbing effects of globalized culture. It’s a source of authentic content at a time when it’s hard to find authenticity, because the world is getting more and more placeless. “Starchitects” are doing more overgrown coffee-table ornaments all over the world, and it’s just making that worse—you know, just dropping something in Dubai and then flying home.
So we take a totally different view. We’re very interested in issues of place—in a very pragmatic way, they give us something to sink our teeth into.
What about the environment? That issue of place is connected, of course, to landscape and therefore the environment. This “renewed modernism” is more environmentally focused. I think the environment is an ancient idea, that every vernacular culture all over the world has always dealt with the environment in a very intelligent way. One of the problems I have with the whole greening movement in our discourse in architecture right now is that it presents these issues as new issues.
In the book about your work, “Plain Modern,” you mention sojourns as an architect-in-training in Kyoto, Los Angeles and Siena. Why those places? I thought of it as the ABCs of an architectural education. You go to Japan to understand their landscape tradition, which is deeply rooted in their culture. For humanism and the Renaissance, you go to Tuscany—a lot of their ideas of the Renaissance were hatched in Siena in the late medieval period.
And I went to Los Angeles because I just needed to confront the suburbs. If you don’t like something, like the suburbs, you just can’t ignore it. I think our profession is too removed from the world—we have to come to terms with the dominant economy. And so I went to study architecture and urban design at UCLA, with Charles Moore, Barton Myers and others—it was a very exciting time in southern California, there were a lot of good modern architects in L.A. then, the early ’80s.
You haven’t mentioned the most famous Los Angeles architect of all, Frank Gehry. Gehry—funny, you know he’s a Canadian guy, too. [Gehry was raised in Toronto.] I think it’s important to respect your elders in any civilized society, and I think he’s just one of those people who’s off the radar—he’s a genius, I think he’s an absolute genius and I don’t like his work. He is different from others in that group because a lot of them aren’t that skilled actually. But he is skilled as an artist and an architect.
Did you grow up in Halifax, where your firm is based? No, my family’s been in one village, marrying their first cousins, for 400 years. The farm where we do “ghost lab” is a lot like that village where I grew up.
Tell me about “Ghost Lab,” your summer retreat where you take students to your farm, and design and build these extraordinary yet simple structures and then leave them to nature and the weather when you’re finished. How does it connect to your regular practice? It’s sort of our one-to-one model shop for our practice, it’s our sandbox, it’s our research lab. When you’re in that village, on that ghost site, you can literally see some of our projects that it has influenced or have influenced it—we’re doing nine buildings in that village right now. I’ve always tried to design my life so everything plays together. I don’t like to think about being an academic one day and a practitioner the next, but that it’s all one project, including family life and community, and the other community of art and architecture—I like to see all that as one place. When we do the ghost thing, it’s very intense, and uh, it leaves me really exhausted at the end, you know? But the next morning, I want to strap my tool belt on again and go right back at it. You feel so energized—physically exhausted but emotionally revved up.
Let’s talk about the Danielson House on the Nova Scotia coast, an inexpensive, partly prefabricated house on a spectacular site. In terms of this modernist idea of the universal, I would call the building type of this house archetypal. It’s a lean-to—it goes back to the first kind of building. It doesn’t belong to Nova Scotia, to me or to anybody. What makes it particular is its particular site, its particular material culture. And the particular clients—he’s a weatherman, so he needs a weather-viewing lean-to.
How did you consider the spaces? For example you created an inglenook, a very small space within a large space. I think of Charles Moore’s interest in humanism: he really talked a lot about making those body-scaled spaces, that humanist agenda coming into that context. If you look at that nook, it’s not particularly beautiful but it works as a place. But it has a window, and if you look through that window, you look at Cape North, which is where the Appalachian Mountain chain crashes into the North Atlantic—it starts in Georgia and it ends right there. And directly above it is the North Star. So that little nook is about the human-body scale at one extreme, and about 3,000 miles of geography. So it’s trying to have a conversation at very different scales, the land scale and body scale.
What’s the farthest from Nova Scotia you’ve built? Right now, we’re completing the Canadian Embassy in Dhaka, in Bangladesh.
I saw that you were doing that, with bricks. It just made me think of Louis Kahn [who designed the National Assembly and other buildings for the capital in Dhaka]. Well, he’s our hero. That’s going to be a good project. We’re just making the brick there. That’s a test of our cultural approach to architecture, in that we’re looking at that culture—you learn about how to see culture at home, when you’re a child—and then you take that method with you, an empathetic method, and say, we’re building in another culture, we better pay attention to their climate, their cultural values, what they do well. Our site is right between the new U.S. Embassy and the Vatican Embassy. It’s like sleeping between two very large elephants.
So how did Louis Kahn inform your work there? Like I said, it’s important to get where you live, and use what’s there, but it’s also important to go to the mountain, and look at the masterworks, the universal and the local.
Kahn is probably the closest of all the modern architects to achieving an archetypal form, a timelessness, a kind of essential architecture. When you look at the Kimbell Museum [which Kahn designed in Fort Worth, Texas], you don’t know, is it 2,000 years old or this year? And that’s very impressive to us. And I guess because we’ve always been interested in making architecture for the public domain, there’s a kind of calm and confident public life that’s possible in and around his buildings—so we like his stuff. And of course in Dhaka he did those wonderful brick drums. Our embassy is kind of a courtyard building—also a drum-like building. But that’s sort of superficial. What it looks like is less important than what we were just talking about.
But he also did bricks in Dhaka… And those classic cylinder forms. So it is a bit of—
—an homage? Do you hate to say that? No, no, not at all. Was it T.S. Eliot who said, “Good poets borrow, the best poets steal outright”?
